Friday, October 5, 2012

Google’s August & September Updates

Google has announced
details on the search algorithm and quality changes made over the past
two months – August and September. In total, Google lists 65 changes
over the past two months.
The previous announcement covered two months as well, and was for June and July.
This time the key changes include Panda updates, improved knowledge
graph, page quality and ranking changes, snippet changes, freshness
updates and SafeSearch changes. Here is the list of some of the changes
categorized by topic:

#83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest
content from a given site when two or more documents from the same
domain are relevant for a given search query.

Sitelinks & Snippets & UI

#83105. [project “Snippets”] We refreshed data used to generate sitelinks.

#83442. [project “Snippets”] This change improved a signal we use to
determine how relevant a possible result title actually is for the
page.

#83443. [project “Knowledge Graph”] We added a lists and collections component to the Knowledge Graph.

#83012. [project “Knowledge Graph] The Knowledge Graph displays
factual information and refinements related to many types of searches.
This launch extended the Knowledge Graph to English-speaking locales
beyond the U.S.

#83304. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change updated signals that
determine when to show summaries of topics in the right-hand panel.

#82407. [project “Other Search Features”] For pages that we do not
crawl because of robots.txt, we are usually unable to generate a snippet
for users to preview what’s on the page. This change added a
replacement snippet that explains that there’s no description available
because of robots.txt.

#83670. [project “Snippets”] We made improvements to surface fewer
generic phrases like “comments on” and “logo” in search result titles.

#84652. [project “Snippets”] We currently generate titles for PDFs
(and other non-html docs) when converting the documents to HTML. These
auto-generated titles are usually good, but this change made them better
by looking at other signals.

#84211. [project “Snippets”] This launch led to better snippet titles.

Image Search

Maru. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch to improve the
handling of adult video content in videos mode for queries that are not
looking for adult content.

Palace. [project “SafeSearch”] This change decreased the amount of
adult content that will show up in Image Search mode when SafeSearch is
set to strict.

#82872. [project “SafeSearch”] In “strict” SafeSearch mode we remove
results if they are not very relevant. This change previously launched
in English, and this change expanded it internationally.